Hej everyone! I’m planning on getting acquainted with Proxmox, but I’m a total noob, so please keep that in mind.
For this experiment, I’ve purchased a Lenovo M90q (Gen 1) to use as an efficient hardware basis. This system will later replace my current one. On it, I want to set up a small number of virtual machines, mainly one for Docker and one for NAS (or set up a NAS with Proxmox itself).
My main concern right now is storage. I’d like to have some redundancy built into my setup, but I am somewhat limited with the M90q. I have space for two M.2 2280 NVMe drives as well as one SATA port. There are also several options to extend this setup using either a Wi-Fi M.2 to SATA or the PCIe x8 to either SATA or NVMe. For now, I’d like to avoid adding complexity and stick with the onboard options, but I'm open to suggestions. I'd buy some new or refurbished WD Red NAS SSDs.
Given the storage options that I have, what would be a sensible setup to have some level of redundancy? I can think of three options:
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ZFS Mirror using two NVMe as well as a SATA-SSD for non-critical storage. I would set up Proxmox and VMs on the same disk and mirror it to have redundancy. I could store ISOs and “ISOs” on the SATA-SSD, where no redundancy is needed, as it would be backed up to a different system anyway.
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Proxmox and VMs each get their own NVMe storage, non-critical storage on the SSD. Here, “redundancy” would be achieved by backing up the host and the VMs to my NAS. This process is somewhat tedious and will cause downtime if something happens.
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Add a Wi-Fi M.2 to SATA adapter and power two SSDs with an external power supply (possibly internal?) and install Proxmox on these.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Am I being too paranoid with redundancy? I’m hosting nothing critical, but downtime would cause some inconvenience (e.g., no Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Pi-hole, Vaultwarden) until I fix it. The data of these services will always be backed up using the 3-2-1 system and I'll move to a HA system in the future when funds allow it.
EDIT: Are there any disadvantages to proxmox and the VMs being on the same disk?
I would prefer 1. Restoring a failed ZFS mirror is easy, and you can continue to operate while a new drive arrives.
2 will get you more space in theory but you'll have downtime with any problem like you said, and you'll also have slower speeds without the mirror.
3 is unnecessary unless you have a good reason.
I don't see any disadvantages with Proxmox and VMs on the same disk, as Proxmox shouldn't have much activity going on.
My suggestion is to set up Proxmox under a VM and give it some virtual disks to replicate these setups and then yank a disk and try to recover. Write down the steps it takes to get back to a normal system and see if that affects your decision.
Excellent suggestion, I didn't even think about testing the setup using a VM as you suggested.
I also lean to option 1, as it is just the simplest. There is conflicting information out there regarding proxmox and the VMs being on the same disk: some people say it's fine, others hate it (although I couldn't quite figure out why, hence the question).
The biggest downside is storage space, but I don't think I'll need all too much since I'm currently running everything on about about 500GB and of those only using 70GB.